Horror Favorites Meme: [5/6] Franchises - Friday the 13th, 1980-2003

“As we sit here today, the notion of franchise horror films is very well-known and taken for granted, but it didn’t exist when I did Friday the 13th. Nobody was ever thinking about, y’know, ‘What will the next one be?’ I mean, it would be a big enough job just to create the first one, but no one could imagine that there would be a need for yet another Friday the 13th. So when it got this, y’know, remarkable success when it was released, Paramount said, ‘Gee, we would like to do another one.’ And I had to ask myself, ‘What does that mean - Friday the 13th as a brand name, what does that mean?’ And I was thinking, ‘Well it’s probably a scary situation in the woods, something or other.’ And I didn’t think that it would make any sense at all to bring Jason back. I mean, Jason was a figment of the girl’s imagination - we think - and what, did he live under the lake? That’s crazy and if you brought him back, how old is he?’ It just seemed to me like, ‘How in the world would you do that and why would you do that? Wouldn’t it be scarier if we did it some other way?’ I’m delighted to say that I was completely wrong about not bringing Jason back.” - Sean S. Cunningham